According to legal experts, President Donald Trump’s decision this week to revoke the security clearances of over forty former intelligence officers is an unprecedented step that highlights his determination to defy long-standing conventions in order to appease his fans and punish his alleged opponents.
According to Dan Meyer, a Washington-based attorney who focuses on security clearance matters, this is the most politically charged security action since the Oppenheimer case in the 1950s.
Meyer was alluding to Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the covert atomic bomb-building program during World War II. Because of his prewar ties to the Communist Party, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance during the height of the McCarthy era.
It has been alleged that prior administrations have revoked security clearances due to political bias or prejudice. Gay persons, for instance, frequently had their security credentials revoked until 1995 because officials said they may be blackmailed. According to Meyer, a partner at the law firm Tully Rinckey, clearances for officials or contractors who were thought to be anti-war were revoked during the Vietnam War.
However, according to Meyer and other legal experts, no president has ever jumped right into the clearance process so widely and publicly as Trump did when he abruptly revoked security clearances for 50 individuals. Additionally, no commander in chief has made the decision to publicly revoke security clearances for previous CIA directors, deputy directors, and other senior intelligence officials—many of whom served in both party administrations.
Trump revoked the security clearances of 49 former senior officials in an executive order issued hours after his inauguration on Monday. The officials had signed a letter more than four years prior that Trump claimed demonstrated improper and deceptive political coordination with Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.
Trump’s assertion has been repeatedly refuted by the former senior officials. Former senior intelligence and national security officials supported the 2020 open letter, which raised the possibility that Russia may have contributed to the dissemination of accusations against Biden’s son Hunter as part of a larger attempt to sway the election’s outcome.
In addition, Trump revoked his former national security adviser John Bolton’s security clearance, claiming that Bolton had disclosed classified material in a memoir. Bolton has denied disclosing any material that could compromise the security of the country.
Trump’s widespread cancellation of clearances, according to the former intelligence officers, is an effort to penalize, threaten, and suppress anyone who questions his assertions.
According to a former senior intelligence official who signed the letter and spoke on condition of anonymity, Trump is attempting to restrict the public remarks made by former government officials out of fear of reprisals. At the time, none of us were employed by the government. We were private individuals.
The executive order would restore the integrity of government institutions, according to a White House official who dismissed the concerns.
“These individuals helped sell a public relations scam to the American people by abusing their previous positions in government,” stated White House National Security Council spokeswoman Brian Hughes in an email. By abusing their rights to meddle in a presidential election, they seriously undermined the Intelligence Community’s trust. The trust of our country’s institutions is being restored by President Trump’s action.
The prospect of more punitive action in connection with the 2020 letter was also heightened by Trump’s directive. According to the executive order, the director of national intelligence must investigate whether any other individuals with security clearances participated in improper activities connected to the letter and report back on their findings within ninety days.
One of the letter’s signatories, Kevin Carroll, said the former officials were just exercising their right to free speech as private persons. According to him, their security clearances shouldn’t be impacted by their public remarks.
According to Carroll, former intelligence officials have the same freedom to express unclassified opinions—whether accurate or not—on public issues as do retired diplomats, military officers, prosecutors, or politicians. Removing their clearances for no other reason is wrong.
Carroll went on to say that public views are not grounds for rescinding a security clearance under the federal rules for allowing access to confidential information.
Other retired officials or military officers frequently voice pro-Trump political views during recent elections without facing consequences, according to former officials singled out by Trump’s executive order.
In an open letter supporting Trump during the 2020 campaign, over 200 retired military officers expressed their concern that the nation’s way of life was in danger from purported socialists and Marxists in the Democratic Party. Their security clearances remained intact.
A lawyer for several of the letter’s signatories, Mark Zaid, stated that he thought many of the former officials had expired security clearances. According to Zaid, the measure was merely a political ploy and had little real impact.
According to Zaid, it was obviously intended to strengthen his support base and demonstrate that he was acting in accordance with their wishes.
It’s unclear if the 50 former officials who would be impacted will file a lawsuit to contest Trump’s executive order. The executive branch maintains broad control over deciding who should have access to classified material, and decisions in cases where security clearance decisions or procedures have been appealed typically favor it.
It is customary for retired CIA directors and deputy directors to have security clearances so that their successors can confer with them on concerns that have arisen.
However, throughout the 2016 election campaign, Trump has had a long-standing mistrust of the nation’s intelligence and national security services. A counterintelligence investigation into potential connections between Trump campaign associates and the Russian government was then started by the FBI. Additionally, U.S. espionage services determined that the Kremlin attempted to use information warfare to secretly sway the election in favor of Trump.
Trump and his allies suspect the intelligence services of engaging in a deep state conspiracy to sabotage his first term. Trump pledged to restructure the Justice Department and the intelligence community during the 2024 presidential campaign.
A disputed letter
According to the president’s directive, which is titled Holding Former Government officers Accountable for Election Interference and Improper Disclosure of Sensitive Governmental Information, 51 former senior intelligence and national security officers signed an open letter in October 2020. (At this time, two of the signatories had passed away.)
The letter, which was distributed to news organizations, responded to a New York Post article that referenced emails the publication claimed originated from Hunter Biden’s laptop. The Post reported on emails pertaining to Hunter Biden’s consulting work in Ukraine and claimed to have acquired the laptop’s hard drive from Trump’s supporter and attorney Rudy Giuliani.
According to the letter from the former authorities, the emails’ appearance contains all the traditional indicators of a Russian information operation.
We want to stress that we do not have proof of Russian involvement and that we are not sure whether the emails that President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, gave to the New York Post are authentic or not. However, our experience leads us to believe that the Russian government was heavily involved in this case.
According to the letter, “We firmly believe that Americans need to be aware of the fact that, if we are correct, this is Russia’s attempt to influence how Americans vote in this election.”
Carroll claimed that considering the evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the former officials’ fears were valid.
However, weeks before the 2020 election, Trump and his supporters interpreted the letter as an attempt by former officials to censor negative information about the Biden family by exploiting their affiliation with U.S. intelligence agencies. They called the people who signed the letter—many of whom were Biden’s supporters—liars and spies.
According to Trump’s executive order, the signatories consciously used the prestige of the Intelligence Community as a weapon to influence politics and threaten our democratic institutions.
After being confirmed, material discovered on the laptop’s hard disk was used as evidence in a criminal investigation on Hunter Biden by the Justice Department. Prosecutors did not accuse Hunter Biden of corrupt dealings in Ukraine but he was convicted on federal gun charges and pled guilty to tax evasion last year.
Intelligence agency career personnel saw themselves as impartial experts committed to assisting the president in making decisions about the nation’s threats. But Trump s executive order shows how a hyperpartisan political landscape can cause a president to not trust career intelligence officials who have served administrations from both parties.
Meyer claimed that Trump has cut off the core leadership from both the present Democratic and former Republican networks of trust. This is about information, and controlling who is in the conversation.
Other presidents have chosen not to exercise their authority over security clearances in such a public, partisan manner, one of the former officials who signed the 2020 letter said. Trump s action demonstrates how he ignores unwritten norms and rules that have largely governed the conduct of his predecessors.
Our democratic system is dependent, at the end of the day, on goodwill and people trying to do the right thing, and there being moral opprobrium attached to not doing the right thing, the ex-official said. And that is no longer there.
Bolton s memoir
In the executive order, Trump said his decision to revoke the clearance for John Bolton, who served as his national security adviser during his first term, was in response to Bolton s memoir, The Room Where It Happened.
In the book, Bolton described Trump as stunningly uninformed on foreign policy andwrote: I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn t driven by re-election calculations.
But Trump s executive order said, The memoir s reckless treatment of sensitive information undermined the ability of future presidents to request and obtain candid advice on matters of national security from their staff.
Bolton and former Justice Department officials have said the book revealed no classified information and that he handled the matter appropriately and lawfully. And a judgerejectedallegations that Bolton pressed ahead with publication without the completion of a government review to remove possible classified information.
Trump this week also canceled Secret Service protection for Bolton. The security detail was provided to Bolton because of an alleged assassination plot that was part of Tehran s bid to retaliate against Trump for his approval of the 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
The Justice Department in 2022 charged a member of Iran s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in an alleged scheme to pay $300,000 to have Bolton killed.
When asked about the decision on Tuesday, Trump told reporters, We are not going to have security on people for the rest of their lives.